Editors' Review

The latest version of Google Earth continues to set the mapping paradigm. Accessible enough for casual users, Google has added features that make it a necessity for those whose topographic desires are more serious. Although Google Ocean is the big newsmaker in version 5, you can also check out the surface of our nearest neighbor, Mars, as well as incorporating historical Earth maps.

If you'll forgive the pun, the oceanic maps are pretty cool. They provide the capability to plunge to the floor of the sea, view exclusive content from the BBC and National Geographic, and explore shipwrecks like the Titanic in 3D. Exploring the Martian surface is limited to data provided from NASA, but that's not much of a limitation considering that it's unlikely that most of us will ever get to visit the Red Planet. Switching between Google Earth, Sky, and Mars can be done from the menubar or from the planet icon on the toolbar.

Most of the interface's real estate displays a rendering of the globe, which can zoom in on a satellite image of your destination once you've keyed it in. Controls live on a top toolbar and a left-side navigation window that lets you quickly jump between different views and locations. Google's Street View, real-time illumination of the Earth, roads, restaurants, and even crime statistics can be displayed. Smooth integration with Google's 3D rendering program SketchUp means that you can design buildings and see how they'd interact with their surroundings on the fly.

The only downside to the program is that it can consume a large amount of RAM, so older machines might experience performance issues, but even that can now be configured through the Options menu. Everyone else is bound to love Google Earth, both as an entertaining novelty and an informational tool.

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Publisher's Description

Google Earth puts a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris, as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, and schools. Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps, and the power of Google Search to put the world's geographic information at your fingertips. With Google Earth you can fly from space to your neighborhood--just type in an address and zoom right in, search for schools, parks, restaurants, and hotels. Get driving directions, tilt and rotate the view to see 3D terrain and buildings, save and share your searches and favorites and even add your own annotations.

What's new in this version:

Version 7.0.3.8542 fixed various issues with balloons no longer flicker while playing tours, SSL certificate revocation errors appropriately, appearance of image and polygon overlays for users running some families of Radeon GPUs, and included stability improvements for users running Earth for extended periods of time.

I honestly have to wonder if companies like google and ebay have people employed with no better endeavor than work on ways to ruin what were once perfectly good programs so they can keep themselves busy fixing them later. This latest version is a complete mess! Thoroughly unpleasant to use, the navigation buttons either don't work or do things you don't want when they almost do. The graphics are a` joke, with the entire landscape looking like broken glass and when you're in surface view chunks of buildings float in the air like flying turds. The whole thing for me, downloading it and trying to stumble through it, was just an annoying waste of time which is bizarre because a couple of years ago it worked great. How did this get through QA? It's like they have a bunch of idiots running the show and just don't care.

NO damned good! I have windows XP and apparently it will not work with it at all. It does weird things, like changes my default browser, tries to set up a new internet connection with connection wizard, which I can't see what that has to do with Google earth, then asks me if i want to compact my outlook mail, which I never use. Then it just locks up, sometimes after turning all the white text yellow. ***!

Summary

I used to love this program and used it constantly, but as soon as they "improved" it it's worthless. I'm totally pissed. Google sucks!

Updated on Apr 15, 2013

Totally worthless. DOES NOT WORK with WindowsXP,period! It's too bad, because this was one of my favorite programs, and now it's gone. Sucky deal.

7.0 runs with the globe missing (transparent with yellow lines). After trying many suggestions to fix it, I downgraded back to 6.2,

You, also, cannot alter the route such as Google Maps -AND- you cannot transfer any information back and forth between the two. All I wanted to do was plot a trip and it was impossible!! Google's extraordinarily lame answer was to plot each section of the trip separately. If I wanted to plot it all by hand, I'd by a real paper map and a highlighter.

Summary

v7.0 terrible.v6.2 barely usable as long as you don't need to do anything crazy like include side trips.

had previous version which worked great, so I thought a newer version would be even better, it downloads, but either doesn't install correctly or completely, I have uninstalled and re-download several times and tried googles tests and fixes

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Full Specifications

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What's new in version 7.0.3.8542

Version 7.0.3.8542 fixed various issues with balloons no longer flicker while playing tours, SSL certificate revocation errors appropriately, appearance of image and polygon overlays for users running some families of Radeon GPUs, and included stability improvements for users running Earth for extended periods of time.